I am Renée and I am an photo lab technician from germany. Well, my biggest hobby is writing stories and so found my way to this forum. I always wanted to learn more about the gaelic language and I hope to learn and have fun here

I am Renée and I am an photo lab technician from germany. Well, my biggest hobby is writing stories and so found my way to this forum. I always wanted to learn more about the gaelic language and I hope to learn and have fun here

Fáilte romhat (Welcome), a Renée.

_________________I'm not a native (or entirely fluent) speaker, so be sure to wait for confirmations/corrections, especially for tattoos.

hey everyone, new guy here. I'm full-on Irish, my family is from Tullamore, and finally made it over to Ireland for a long visit last year (and already wanting to get back). I'm here because I want to learn more about Gaelic and the Ogham alphabet. I just want to become more educated about my heritage. I'm looking forward to learning more!

Fáilte romhat, a qwerty.

_________________I'm not a native (or entirely fluent) speaker, so be sure to wait for confirmations/corrections, especially for tattoos.

Mark is ainm dom agus tá mé i mo chónaí i Chicago. I blew my free course on Ranganna a couple years ago, but I'm back now with a plan. I'm starting with Micheal O'Siadhail's Learning Irish and Mary Stenson's workbook, have a pretty decent streak going on Duolingo and am considering Ros na Rún to assist in pronunciation and conversation building. Anyway, I hear this place is the real deal.

Mark is ainm dom agus tá mé i mo chónaí i Chicago. I blew my free course on Ranganna a couple years ago, but I'm back now with a plan. I'm starting with Micheal O'Siadhail's Learning Irish and Mary Stenson's workbook, have a pretty decent streak going on Duolingo and am considering Ros na Rún to assist in pronunciation and conversation building. Anyway, I hear this place is the real deal.

Slán go foíll!

Fáilte romhat, a Mark. There are many people who use this site who have started and stopped their Irish learning from time to time over the years (including me), so you are in good company.

_________________I'm not a native (or entirely fluent) speaker, so be sure to wait for confirmations/corrections, especially for tattoos.

Hi, sorry my only words are English in, for now. I wanted to tell you all something I learned about language.

My children's father was Irish, and told me that everybody in Ireland can like ask a school teacher may I please go to the toilet in gaelic, but only those with enough West Coast accent speak Gaelic. Years later, I gate-crashed a linguists conference by accident, and got invited to stay, and heard from linguists who specialized in Hebrew revitalization, that after WW2 linguists all anticipated Irish Gaelic revitalization would occur faster than Hebrew in Israel, and yet it all happened the other way, and Hebrew moved on faster with more speakers sooner. The linguists telling me were Israeli, and maybe had a bit of a funny notion about their language being that special, or themselves that clever, as the reason. But what is obvious, is that in Israel, children being taught to speak Hebrew at school, are taught that it is compulsory to go home and instruct their family to use Hebrew in the kitchen and at the dinner table, whereas in Irish schools, children had been taught a compulsion to speak of poo. Now if only a linguist could take stock of that fact, perhaps Irish Gaelic revitalization will overtake Hebrew in the end.

I think you could all answer with "mar is leat" and I will understand well

I think the cases of Hebrew and Irish are very different and that linguists were wrong to ever suppose that Irish would be revived more easily than Hebrew. Everyone moving to Israel did not already speak the same language. At first there were mostly speakers of Russian and Yiddish, and then many speakers of Arabic (and of course so many other languages), and they could not easily communicate with each other. There was great incentive to speak Hebrew to communicate outside of your immediate family and friends. In Ireland, 100% of people speak English so there is no reason to try speaking Irish with one another. In Israel, also, there was a huge amount of momentum and enthusiasm over the creation of a new Jewish state. Everyone was dropping everything to sail across the sea and start over and live in a new Jewish community where they would all be more Jewish and more happy then they ever were before. Ireland is not like that at all. There are some people who are enthusiastic about Irish and about Ireland, but most people are just average seans who are satisfied with the status quo. They would not be leaving their lives behind and sailing across the world to join a new Irish community.Finally, there is a huge difference in that Irish did not die before being revitalized. Today, there are still people who speak Irish as a native language. When millions of Irish people speak their horrible, heavily-accented, and filled-with-English Irish, these Irish speakers are not impressed. In Israel, nobody spoke Hebrew as a native language anymore. So when all these beginners started speaking horrible Hebrew and making horrible obvious mistakes, nobody cared. Today's modern Hebrew is very different from biblical Hebrew as a result. Several letters are pronounced completely wrong, many grammatical rules are violated, and totally non-idiomatic structures are common. But nobody was there to tell them you are wrong and make them feel bad so they just went with it. And now they have a completely new language. Irish people do not want a new language, they want to keep real Irish. And that is much more difficult.

Of course in hindsight it is easy to explain why they were wrong and Hebrew was easier to revitalize than Irish. Perhaps at the time it was not as obvious as it seems now. My guess is that linguists at that time assumed that Irish people were passionate about Irish and that that would be enough. Well now we know that both most Irish people are not passionate about Irish and that even for those who are it is not enough.

I'm here initially for help in identifying a place name on a relatives birth register.I am however, on a looong term mission to pick up some Irish...I play Celtic instruments & really enjoy all that that wonderful country and her people have brought to theworld.

Mark is ainm dom agus tá mé i mo chónaí i Chicago. I blew my free course on Ranganna a couple years ago, but I'm back now with a plan. I'm starting with Micheal O'Siadhail's Learning Irish and Mary Stenson's workbook, have a pretty decent streak going on Duolingo and am considering Ros na Rún to assist in pronunciation and conversation building. Anyway, I hear this place is the real deal.

Slán go foíll!

Hi Gravecloth! How's it going with Learning Irish?

If you're finding it hard going, there are two simpler options for getting started. One is Colloquial Irish, where the speakers use the Cois Fharraige sub-dialect of the Connemara dialect. I.e. the same sub-dialect used in Learning Irish. You can find the book and audio recordings for free on various websites. Another is Buntús Cainte, volumes 1, 2, and 3. The audio is recorded by native speakers from Connemara but they don't use dialect-specific phrases.

On the forums here the main complaints that Irish-speakers have about learning materials is about the poor quality of the recordings, e.g. recorded by non-natives or using Irish in a way that a native wouldn't. But from reading lots of comments here, Colloquial Irish and Buntús Cainte have the seal of approval. As does Learning Irish.

But... neither go as far as Learning Irish does, so in the end you'll still have to go back to that book, but if you start with one or both of the other books then you'll have the base of knowledge and confidence to get you through the shortcomings of Learning Irish in terms of being poorly organised and containing a few consistency errors.

...or if Learning Irish is working for you, then that's great. Let us know how you get along and what you think of whatever materials you use.